A lot of people know that mc (Midnight Commander) goes haywire while accessing gpm in (I believe, so far) screen and tmux -- if you are not superuser. Just look at the out-of-control log growth -- and constant 100% CPU usage. This has been an ongoing issue for MANY years (Google it). The ONLY (AFAIK) known 'solution' to this vexing quirk is to set the TERM environment variable in the non-superuser screen/tmux window to 'TERM=xterm' (if there is more that can be done, I'm all eyes).

So: I'd like to know if anyone here has any clue as to progress on this thing. I can't believe it couldn't be easily fixed (I wish I'd had the time and the knowledge).

that help?

Not a real solution, eh? The mc code base has to be debugged somehow.